This WordPress.com site is the cat’s pajamas

Women in Horror Month

I’ve had this blog for several years, and seeing as I have yet to publish anything, it makes me feel good to be promoting something positive with my first post. February is Women in Horror month. I’ve been trying to decide how I would celebrate the accomplishments of women in genre this month, and I’ve come up with the following:

1)Listen to more episodes of the Faculty of Horror podcast. I discovered this show early this year, and have been catching up feverishly since. 2 women (who do a heck of a lot of other interesting stuff in addition to this podcast) analyze movies that have significance to them or the genre from a feminist perspective. It’s been great for convincing my wife to watch movies she might not otherwise want to watch (she loves horror, but is picky, and prefers having spoilers). As you’ll see, this podcast has ended up impacting most of what I’ll be doing this month, so it seems fitting to place it at the top, despite them not being creators that this month intends to honor.

2)My wife and I are attending this screening for Etheria Toronto (which is hosted by the team behind Ultra8 Pictures and the hosts of the above-mentioned Faculty of Horror) which features a bunch short films by women from around the world. I’m especially excited by this, because seeing short film is always hard outside of a festival setting, especially Canadian film. I’m also really looking forward to the panel after.

3)Read more books. I tried to come up with a list of books by Canadians for people to read, and I realized that there’s a lot I’ve been meaning to read, but haven’t yet. Chizine Publications (CZP) seems like a great place to start – not only because I interned there years ago, so I know they publish great stuff, but because I have a lot of their publications and they publish a lot by women. CZP Co-Publisher Sandra Kasturi and current and former Managing Editors Samantha Beiko and Helen Marshall deserve some recognition, both for the work behind the scenes as well as being accomplished writers. One of the first CZP books I ever read was Halli Villegas’ The Hair Wreath, which scared the crap out of me by reminding me of childhood fears (like seeing the Woman in Black at the Young People’s Theatre). Gemma Files is someone whose literary work I came to late, but I will be reading an old collection of hers this month, Kissing Carrion (which is now available digitally through CZP). After that I’ll go through as many of these as I can. As this blog post shows, CZP and affiliates feature strong representation by women.

4)Watch more movies. Watching homework (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) for Faculty of Horror lead me to renting something compared to it. I was a little worried about the Soska sister’s American Mary being unwatchably (for me) gruesome and gory, it being about underground body modification and all, but that was much less of a feature than I expected and I was able to watch it all the way through despite the difficult subject.